Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

Instead, Amazon committed fully to its flywheel and then innovated aggressively within that flywheel to build and accelerate momentum. Amazon

The big successes tended to make big bets after they’d empirically validated that the bet would pay off, whereas the less successful comparisons tended to make big bets before having empirical validation. We coined the concept fire bullets, then cannonballs to capture the difference.19

For a truly great company, the Big Thing is never any specific line of business or product or idea or invention. The Big Thing is your underlying flywheel architecture

apply that understanding with creativity and discipline, you get the power of strategic compounding.

Test the flywheel against the three circles of your Hedgehog Concept. A Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deeply understanding the intersection of the following three circles: (1) what you’re deeply passionate about, (2) what you can be the best in the world at, and (3) what drives your economic or

Organizations without the components of a flywheel already in place—such as early-stage entrepreneurial companies—can sometimes jump-start the process by importing insights from flywheels that others have built.

the most committed audience members want to be engaged, inspired, challenged, surprised, stunned, overwhelmed. They don’t want to have a “nice listening moment” that they forget. They want to grow from a transformative musical experience that ignites the spirit and has a lasting emotional impact.

In creating a good-to-great transformation, there’s no single defining action, no grand program, no single killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment.

THE FLYWHEEL No matter how dramatic the end result, building a great enterprise never happens in one fell swoop. There’s no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum unti

But how to turn a single product into a sustained flywheel, especially as a garage start-up? Gentes studied Nike and gleaned an essential insight. There’s a hierarchy of social influence for athletic gear. If, for instance, you get a Tour de France winner to wear your helmet, serious nonprofessional cyclists will want to wear that helmet, which the